Articles in category: IT Infrastructure

In spite of Microsoft and VMware encroaching on its core product areas, Citrix is a company which seems to have “staying power”. Traditionally associated with thin client technology, in which desktop applications can be streamed to devices, Citrix has remained surprisingly resilient as major players such as Microsoft and VMware chip away at its core technologies. It survived as Microsoft introduced a free thin client technology, Terminal Services, into Windows Server, and carried on adapting its product mix when VMware began pushing its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product, Horizon.

Certain pieces of technology tend to stick around. USB has been the connector of choice for all manner of peripherals for two decades, and ATA hard disks, first parallel and now serial, have a history back to 1986. Over the last few years, however, we've started to see real alternatives to these technologies hit the market, with NVMe storage and Thunderbolt 3 for attaching devices. Our platonic ideal of what a laptop computer should be has shifted somewhat. As we head into 2017 and all the systems that will inevitably be announced at CES, we felt it would be ...

With the announcement of a broad swathe of new data products and services at Microsoft Connect in New York City last week -- including that the next release of SQL Server will support Linux (and Docker) -- the software giant has signaled a renewed focus on customer choice and flexibility, underscoring the increasing importance of cloud computing as a central pillar of its business.

There's an arms race among public cloud providers to equip businesses with the best machine learning capabilities. Enterprises are increasingly interested in creating intelligent applications, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are rushing to help meet their needs.

Google is opening up the Southeast Asian market to its range of cloud products with a new product range and a datacentre in Singapore. In early October, the internet giant announced Google Cloud products, technologies and services. Google will build nine new datacentres by 2017, with four in Asia-Pacific (Apac), including Singapore. Currently, its only operational datacentre in Asia is in Taiwan. Organisations using cloud service often demand that software and data is locally stored.

Despite barriers such as cost of implementation and customer preference for mobile technologies, desktop virtualisation will see steady growth in the Asean region. Among the Asia-Pacific countries, the IDC report noted the level of virtualisation in South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong was on a par with western countries. Countries such as China, India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand, it said, were 12-18 months behind them, while most Southeast Asian countries were more than two years behind the leading pack.

VMware has treated Amazon's cloud service as an existential threat for years. Now the two companies are teaming up. The post Amazon Teaming With VMware Is the Latest Sign the Cloud Has Won appeared first on WIRED .

The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency. Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.

Data center power management vendor Eaton’s newest product has sensors that that the company says will proactively warn customers of when equipment component failures are likely to occur. Eaton’s announcement today of PulseIngisht Analaytics is part of a broader trend in the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) market moving to cloud-based platforms, says 451 Research director for data center technologies Rhonda Ascierto.

Choosing the wrong cloud service for customer engagement and business communications can be costly for high-growth digital businesses. Just ask someone that made the migration and then needed to bring some functions back.

A majority of enterprises say the internet of things is strategic to their business, but most still take a piecemeal approach to IoT security. Those results from a global IDC survey conducted in July and August reveal both the promise and the growing pains of IoT, a set of technologies that may help many industries but can’t simply be plugged in. The 27-country survey had more than 4,500 respondents, all from organizations with 100 or more employees.

One of the big issues facing public cloud vendors is persuading companies to take on-premises workloads and move them to a public cloud data center. Oracle is trying to enable that shift with a new set of products that allow customers to get the same hardware that Oracle runs in its data centers behind their own firewalls. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison unveiled the Big Data@Customer and Exadata@Customer machines on Sunday, building on the company's Cloud@Customer hardware offering.

Nextcloud is teaming up with Canonical and WDLabs (an internal team of innovators to explore new ideas) to bring ‘private-cloud-in-a-box’ devices to the market. It’s the continuation of the work Nextcloud team was doing with WDLabs, before splitting up with ownCloud.

Nextcloud Box is essentially a reference device that uses Raspberry Pi for compute and network, and WD hard drive for storage. Ubuntu core is the operating system and Nextcloud is the file sync software.

Market watcher claims enterprise aspirations around cloud adoption are not being met. Enterprise expectations about how fast they can start moving applications and workloads off-premises could be too high, according to research firm Gartner. The warning follows the market watcher’s prediction that the public cloud services market will grow by 17.2% in 2016 to $208.6bn, up from $178bn last year. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, of which Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google are all major participants, will account for most of this, with Gartner predicting growth in the region of 42.8%.

Dell and EMC have completed their $67 billion merger to create Dell Technologies, the world's largest privately held technology company. It's a historic day, far from the PC company that sponsored the "Dude, I've bought a Dell" campaign. The new company will sell PCs, servers, storage, networking and software products. It has an impressive list of assets including Dell's PC and servers, EMC storage, VMWare, RSA, Wyse, Force10 and the Pivotal software and Boomi cloud services.

Within two years, a majority of enterprises expect to be running their workloads in the cloud. After getting past considerable concerns about privacy and security, companies are increasingly placing their faith -- and their information and services -- in the cloud.

The cloud has become the default for practically every industry, from storage to transportation to communication to retail. But there’s one fundamental space out of which it has yet to take a bite. Ironically, software development — the process of editing, building, debugging and analyzing code that makes everything in the cloud possible — is still primarily done offline.

StackIQ is a California based company that offers a server automation platform for clustered, scale-out IT infrastructure. I met up with Greg Bruno, VP of engineering and co-founder of StackIQ, to learn more about the company, its product and the Stacki open source project. Here is an edited version of that interview.

There’s broad recognition among enterprises of the need for network modernization, but many decision-makers are constrained by the prospect of capital equipment outlays, proving a solid return on investment, or fear of being locked into a proprietary solution. Those are key findings in a soon to be published survey conducted by IDG Research Services.

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors. Named Data Networking (NDN) may be in the early stages of development, but the strides being made are compelling. Gartner predicts NDN won't hit the “Plateau of Productivity” on their Hype Cycle for more than ten years, but when it does, a monumental shift in data organization and retrieval will come with it.

After a quarter of a century, there are plenty of opportunities for Linux to grow -- but there are still challenges ahead. Where next for the open source project?

"Linux has a substantial opportunity in new technology segments, such as IoT, containers and cloud, but also in the industry segments that sometimes take time to adapt and evolve," says Frank Fanzilli, director of The Linux Foundation and former Global CIO for Credit Suisse First Boston.